The Problem With Boycotting Israel

When you hear that thousands of writers have signed a petition, you can already guess what they are calling for: What other than boycotting Israel could generate such enthusiasm among the literati?

A staggering 6,000 writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter to address “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.” They are calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. The letter says that these institutions have played a crucial role in “normalizing … injustices” and that cooperating with them harms Palestinians—the implication being that withholding cooperation will help Palestinians. Signatories include some of the best writers alive. If you like to read, chances are a favorite of yours is on here. Among the best-known are the novelists Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Annie Ernaux. Some of my own favorites include the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, and the British critic Owen Hatherley.

[Read: The cowardice of open letters]

Predictably, the letter has led to a backlash. Almost 1,000 writers issued a counter-letter. They include the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet, the essayist Adam Gopnik, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and the Nobel laureate Herta Müller. My favorite signatory on this one is another Nobel laureate, the fiery left-wing feminist Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, known for her 1983 masterpiece The Piano Teacher.

I am as horrified as anyone by Israel’s brutal and criminal war in Gaza and its decades-long regime of occupation. As a writer, my primary solidarity is with the dozens of journalists killed in the conflict in the past year, the majority of whom were Palestinian. But I also have no doubt as to which side of this literary civil war I am on.

I’ve never joined a cultural boycott of any country—not Israel, not Russia, and not Iran, my own country of birth. The latter informs my outlook on the issue.

I grew up in one of the most culturally isolated countries on Earth. Our case was of course very different from Israel’s. Iran’s isolation was partly the doing of its own government, which banned foreign cultural products that violated its religious and political strictures—meaning most of them. Cinemas hardly ever showed newly released foreign films (rare exceptions included Michael Moore’s Sicko and Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile). The censors constrained what foreign literature Iranian publishers could translate and publish.

But our isolation also owed to the international sanctions on Iran that made any financial exchange with foreign entities into a potentially criminal affair. For example, we might have accessed banned foreign literature by ordering copies in original languages from abroad—except that this was not so easy in a country that had no credit cards, partly because international banks faced legal penalties for transacting with anybody inside it. When I was a teenager, my mom once helped me order a copy of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation through Amazon, using a prepaid card we went to some trouble to obtain from Dubai. The ordering process was labyrinthine, and even then, the book took six months to arrive. (My Palestinian friends in the occupied West Bank tell me of similar travails, because their post is sometimes held by Israel for months.) In 2002, Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was exposed, and the United States imposed a progression of sanctions that effectively blocked even this circuitous route. Today, many such simple exchanges between Iran and Western countries are close to impossible.

Some opponents of the Iranian regime abroad have reinforced Iran’s isolation by equating cultural exchange with an unwanted “normalization” of the regime. They have protested the inclusion of Iranian films at festivals and the travel of Western cultural figures to Iran. I left Iran in 2008, but I have never supported such efforts, because I saw for myself how cultural isolation served Iran’s oppressors. Many of us in Iranian society wanted nothing more than to find allies, counterparts, and inspiration abroad, and our regime wanted nothing less for us. Boycotting the country simply advanced the cause of our adversaries—namely, to cut the Iranian population off from influences that could bolster its courage and expand the reach of its solidarity.

That the Iranian people yearned for such contact was evident to those Western thinkers who did manage to visit. Jürgen Habermas, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Ignatieff, and Richard Rorty were among those who traveled to Iran and were treated like pop stars, filling meeting halls and taking part in enthusiastic exchanges with Iranians. Sadly these visits have dwindled in recent years, not just because of the regime's restrictions, but also because sanctions make any such exchange a tremendous hassle and a potential violation of U.S. law. (Foreign visitors also fear coming, because of the regime’s grim track record of taking Western citizens hostage.) That Iranians can still enjoy a good deal of foreign literature in Persian translation owes entirely to the courage and persistence of Iranian publishers, many of whom have tangled with both the censors, who determine what is permissible, and the sanctions, which make dealings with publishers around the world difficult.

When I hear of boycotts on Israeli writers, I think of those Israeli writers who have been published in Persian translation regardless of these obstacles. I ask myself who would benefit if fewer Iranians could read Amos Oz’s enchanting fairy tale, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, rendered in Persian by the Marxist poet Shahrouz Rashid. The book tells of two children in an unnamed village who decide, against the advice of their parents, to seek out a demon that has taken all the animals away. Some critics saw this story as an allusion to the Holocaust. I remember discussing it with friends in Tehran and finding within it our own meanings and references. We dreamed of meeting Oz, who died in 2018, and of sharing our interpretations with him. What good is served by severing such cross-cultural exchange?

Some supporters of boycotts will address these concerns by saying that their means are selective, that they punish only those writers or other artists who are linked, financially or ideologically, with states engaged in objectionable behavior, and that doing so has a track record of success in changing state behavior. But the question of which artists to tar as complicit with their governments’ policies is not a simple one, and boycotts are a blunt instrument at best.

For instance, the writers’ petition explicitly calls for sanctioning only those Israeli cultural institutions that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights” or “have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” Any Israeli cultural institution that has had to rely on state funding, in any form or at any point, could conceivably fall afoul of this criterion. Perhaps this explains why LitHub, the outlet that first published the letter, has done away with niceties and simply headlined it as a “pledge to boycott Israeli cultural institutions,” as have most other outlets.

[Read: When writers silence writers]

Since it was founded in 2005, the Palestinian-led movement for boycotts, sanctions, and divestment (BDS) against Israel has shown that it likes to paint with a broad brush, censuring organizations that promote contact between Palestinians and Israelis on the grounds that they “normalize” Israel: In the past, BDS has boycotted the Arab-Jewish orchestra started by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said; one of its most recent targets was Standing Together, a courageous group of anti-war Israeli citizens, both Jewish and Palestinian, whose leaders and members have faced arrest in their long fight against Israel’s occupation. A similar zeal seems to animate those who have promoted a boycott of Russian culture following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Many of those who advocate cultural sanctions point to South Africa as the shining example of boycott success. As is often the case with politicized appeals to history, the purpose here is to draw a strong moral injunction: Who could possibly stand on the side of the apartheid regime, which was triumphantly brought down in the 1990s and replaced by a multiracial democracy? But the history of the boycott movement against South Africa is more complicated than those analogizing it commonly acknowledge.

Started in 1959 following a call by the African National Congress, the movement encompassed pledges not to work with South African universities or publishers and not to perform in South African venues. Several major U.S. publishers refused to provide books to South African libraries. The boycott’s proponents included not only fiery left-wingers but liberal doyens, such as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the American Library Association (ALA), which refused to work with any publisher that traded with South Africa. In 1980, the United Nations General Assembly voted to back the boycott and asked member states to “prevent all cultural, academic, sports, and other exchanges with the racist regime of South Africa.” When apartheid finally collapsed in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela proudly proclaimed the return of his country to the international community.

But for all that they may have achieved, the boycotts were far from uncontroversial, even among opponents of apartheid. Many South African trade unions and social movements were in favor of them, but the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the main workers’ organization that helped bring down the regime, was concerned that divestment could lead to the loss of jobs and pensions. Parts of that group embraced selective boycotts instead of a blanket ban.

Sanctions were even more contested in the art world. In 1975, Khabi Mngoma, the legendary principal of Johannesburg’s African Music and Drama Association (AMDA), which had produced stars such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, visited New York to campaign against the boycott movement. “We feel isolated inside South Africa,” he told The New York Times, “and we also feel isolated by the outside world.”

Mngoma was especially incensed that Black Americans were boycotting his country. “The students in our school, for example, would gain tremendously simply by being exposed in seminars and other classes to the expertise of black American artists,” he said. “By staying away, blacks here do us a great disservice.” But the zealots of the boycott movement didn’t listen to the likes of Mngoma. In 1972, Muhammad Ali was scheduled to compete in South Africa, but a vociferous campaign dissuaded him from doing so.

Mngoma believed that engagement could be more constructive than sanction. On an earlier trip to New York, in 1968, he met with theater personalities and tried to persuade them to perform in South Africa instead of boycotting; they could tax white audiences and channel the money to Black theater. That strategy had some successes. The Broadway musicals Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof were performed in South Africa and contributed tens of thousands of dollars in royalties to AMDA. Later, the American playwright Arthur Miller agreed to stage his plays in South Africa, but only for desegregated audiences. The singer Paul Simon recorded his Graceland album in South Africa in 1986, insisting on the importance of working with Black artists in the country. A year later, he headlined an enormous anti-apartheid concert in Zimbabwe with Makeba and Masekela. That same year, boycott proponents picketed his concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall and denounced him.

Just how important a role the boycotts played in ending apartheid is disputed. Mattie C. Webb, a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Yale, tells me they were significant, “but they were only one factor in a broader movement that also included internal social movements against apartheid. The sanctions themselves were limited, and frankly came rather late in the broader struggle against apartheid.” Lior Sternfeld, an Israeli American historian of Iran at Penn State, put a finer point on this, telling me: “I have tried in vain to find any empirical evidence that the boycott movement helped topple the South African regime.”

Sternfeld has taken an interest in the question because of his work involving Israel and Iran. He is a critic of Israeli policy—both the occupation and the conduct of the war in Gaza—and he makes no brief for Israeli universities, which he says have tried “to get cozy with the government.” He does favor some sanctions—for example, kicking Israel out of the FIFA World Cup and other sporting events, as has been done to Russia. But he believes that cultural boycotts will primarily hurt Israeli intellectuals, who are already demonized by their government.

“I have always believed that activism is about engagement, whereas BDS is articulated as a call for disengagement,” he told me. “I oppose the boycotts because it is important to have some sort of a bridge to Israeli intelligentsia.”

Sternfeld’s position, like mine, is informed by observing the results of sanctions against Iran. He points specifically to How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, a book published earlier this year by four Iranian American scholars, which argues that isolation has had adverse effects on Iran’s political culture and has counterproductively strengthened the regime’s repressive apparatus. The Iranian scholar Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an outspoken opponent of the sanctions on Iran, has raised questions about boycotting Israel for similar reasons, to the ire of some on the left.

Lately Iran and Israel have found themselves ever more dangerously at odds, and the lack of people-to-people contact between the two countries doesn’t help. That’s one reason Sternfeld accepted a surprising overture in September: The Iranian mission to the United Nations invited him to attend an interfaith meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This encounter made Pezeshkian the first post-revolutionary Iranian president to knowingly and openly meet with an Israeli citizen. Iranian hard-liners attacked him for it relentlessly. As for Sternfeld, some critics of the Iranian regime in the United States denounced him for taking the meeting, even as hard-liners in Tehran called him a Zionist infiltrator.

Iran bans its citizens from visiting Israel, but numerous Iranian writers and artists in exile have traveled to the country anyway in recent years. Their visits have helped show Israelis, used to hearing of the “Iranian threat” from their government, a more human side of the country.

The filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a guest of honor at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013. Makhmalbaf was once an Islamist revolutionary; he spent four and a half years in prison before the 1979 revolution. But he went through a remarkable metamorphosis in the 1990s, becoming an anti-regime dissident and winding up in exile in Paris.

“I am one of the ambassadors for Iranian art to Israel, and my message was of peace and friendship,” he told The Guardian of his trip at the time. “When I flew to Israel last week, I felt like a man flying to another planet, like a man flying to the moon.” Makhmalbaf criticized the logic of boycotters, saying, “If I make a film in Iran, and you come to my country to watch it, does it mean you confirm dictatorship in Iran and you have no respect for political prisoners in Iran?” he asked rhetorically of his critics. “If you go to the US, does it mean you confirm their attack on Afghanistan and Iraq?"

Orly Cohen, a Tehran-born scholar who has lived in Israel most of her life, has helped organize the trips of several Iranian artists to the country. Now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Haifa, she has also translated the work of Iranian poets into Hebrew.

“In the Israeli news, all Israelis hear of Iran is war,” she told me by phone. “They don’t know about Iran’s culture and how much beautiful art is made in the country today.”

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel–but they can’t stop it]

Cohen translated a book of poems by Mehdi Mousavi, known in Iran as the “father of postmodern poetry,” and facilitated his visit to Israel last year for its publication. He was the subject of a cover story in Haaretz, and he struck up a relationship with a well-known Iraqi-born poet, Ronny Someck. “He was seen as a bridge of friendship,” Cohen told me. “For the first time,” she said of Mousavi’s Israeli audience, “they saw Iran through Iranian, not Israeli, eyes.”

Cohen also helped organize an exhibition about Iranian feminist movements at Jerusalem’s Museum of Islamic Art. Israeli feminists took an interest, but what surprised Cohen more was the feedback from religious Jews, some of whom were inspired by the example of Iranian women standing up to religious repression.

Boycotts preclude such experiences and connections. In the years since 2005, when the Palestinian movement adopted BDS, the tenuous links that once allowed Israeli and Palestinian scholars and artists to be in contact have been cut one after another. Israeli peace activists used to travel frequently to the West Bank and speak at events there. But in 2014, Amira Hass, Haaretz’s correspondent in Ramallah and a vociferous critic of the Israeli occupation, was kicked out of an event at Bir Zeit University by two professors.

Some boycotters do seem concerned about punishing people like Hass, hence the guidelines that carve out ostensible exceptions for those who are critical of the policies of the boycotted state. But I don’t see how any freedom-loving writer can embrace such a position. What distinguishes us from authoritarians and censors if we impose ideological litmus tests to decide which writers can present their work at festivals—if we ask them to declare their opposition to a political regime before they are allowed to speak?

This world is full of walls that divide peoples, and of regimes that impose ideological purity tests on writers. If writers are to use our collective powers, it should not be to add to them.